Global warming: New challenges for the common fisheries policy?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a substantial warming of the earth's atmosphere during the current and the next century. This warming, if it occurs, is likely to have a significant impact on marine ecosystems and the size, yield, location and range of many commercial fish stocks.

This prospect raises several problems for the European Union Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). First, given these expected changes, what would be the optimal time path for total allowable catches (TACs), fishing fleets, fishing methods and so on? Second, since the geographical location and range of many fish stocks are likely to change, possibly quite dramatically, allocations of TAC-shares to member states may become increasingly anomalous resulting in various kinds of strain on the CFP and the principle of relative stability.

A similar but potentially more acute problem applies with respect to commercial fish stocks shared with non-member states. Altered location and behaviour of these fish stocks may render existing international agreements regarding the sharing of yield from these stocks obsolete giving rise to serious international disputes.

It appears that marine environmental changes in the North Atlantic with the mackerel stock currently undertaking unprecedented migrations far beyond the EU jurisdiction into the EEZs of Iceland and the Faroe Islands are already causing problems of this kind.